FALL is here....
Wow time is flying in 4-3. I can't believe we move into October this week. We are continuing to establish routines and expectations as we begin fourth grade. The pace definitely picks up from third to fourth grade as we transition from learning to read, write and compute to using these skills to learn. A big part of fourth grade is establishing good work and study habits. Your support at home in this endeavor is so appreciated!
Student Council RepresentativeS
Many students submitted personal statements about their desire and willingness to be a student council representative this year for 4-3. Each student that submitted really did an excellent job and gave 100% effort to this task, so it made it very difficult to choose. As a class we agreed to put names in a jar and choose one boy and one girl randomly because, as I said, each student really did express thoughtfully why they were a good choice for this leadership role so doing so randomly would produce great choices. Julia Szwedo and Ben Tanquary will be our reps this year.
Math
Our class did very well on the Unit 1 Math assessment. Please continue to drill those facts. We are moving on to subtraction timed tests this week.
We began Unit 2 last week in Math: Using Numbers and Organizing Data. The following concepts are covered in this unit:
The Unit 2 Assessment will be the week of October 5th.
We began Unit 2 last week in Math: Using Numbers and Organizing Data. The following concepts are covered in this unit:
- The many names for different numbers
- Place Value
- Different algorithms for Addition and Subtraction of multi-digit numbers
- Finding Mean, Median, Mode and Range for a set of data
- Using charts and graphs to analyze and display information on data
The Unit 2 Assessment will be the week of October 5th.
Literacy
We are through the first half of our launch unit and many reading strategies have been modeled through some amazing mentor texts provided by the Schoolwide Literacy program. Ask your students about these stories and check them out from the Arlington Library if you get a chance:
Our class read aloud is Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio by Peg Kehret. This is one of my favorites and my children's all time favorite books! Your children are really enjoying it as well. It is a memoir told from the perspective of young Peg and how she contracted and beat polio in the late 1940's. I use this text as well to model the reading strategies we have been discussing during Reading Workshop. We have a very special guest visiting us this week to present to the students about her work with the polio vaccine. Mrs. Mary Stitt will join us on Tuesday, September 29th to share about her international work with the Rotary Club. This really is a powerful way for your students to feel connected to this story and to our greater world.
- Tomas and the Library Lady by Pat Mora
- Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 by Brian Floca
- The Lonely Book by Kate Bernheimer
- Planting the Trees of Kenya : The Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire Nivola
- Albert by Donna Jo Napoli
Our class read aloud is Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio by Peg Kehret. This is one of my favorites and my children's all time favorite books! Your children are really enjoying it as well. It is a memoir told from the perspective of young Peg and how she contracted and beat polio in the late 1940's. I use this text as well to model the reading strategies we have been discussing during Reading Workshop. We have a very special guest visiting us this week to present to the students about her work with the polio vaccine. Mrs. Mary Stitt will join us on Tuesday, September 29th to share about her international work with the Rotary Club. This really is a powerful way for your students to feel connected to this story and to our greater world.
WEX/WORD Study
We continue to work through our first WEX unit and practiced writing from a different perspective. Students drew a picture of one of their shoes. They thought this was a riot since they got to take off their shoes in class! They were then asked to write a short piece about what it would be like to encounter their shoe if they were only 1 inch tall. We shared them with a partner and gave some peer feedback and then students used Google Docs to type up their piece.
Word Study was tweaked a bit after our first week. In order for students to be moved up a list to 5th grade words, they must earn a 95% or higher on three consecutive PRE-TESTS. Once they do this they will stay on the 5th grade lists for the remainder of the year.
Word Study was tweaked a bit after our first week. In order for students to be moved up a list to 5th grade words, they must earn a 95% or higher on three consecutive PRE-TESTS. Once they do this they will stay on the 5th grade lists for the remainder of the year.
SCIENCE
Matter is still our topic and the class has completed some interactive lessons in order for them to understand the concepts of volume and density. Students became familiar with these big ideas:
- All matter takes up space (has volume) and has a mass (which we usually measure by weight.)
- Volume= How much space something takes up
- Volume and weight does not change when the state of the matter changes, as long as nothing new was added or removed.
- Density=How heavy or light something is for its size